From an OU creative writing course:
Character Exercise
This time you should also make your character desire something, and make the desire their driving force. It will work best if you make whatever the character desires desirable in the reader’s eyes too. Think about why they can never have what they want. ‘Three Hours Between Planes’ is a good example of this. (Bizarre Short Story by F. Scott Fitzgerald)
By giving your character desires and disappointments you will see how this quickly develops potential stories.
Ian had been told that desire dies in your sixties. A therapist had told him that. A harsh featured middle aged woman with flat eyes and a fiercely hooked nose. Harsh featured Miriam-she of the great certainty.
‘One writer spoke of it as riding the wild stallion which is then tamed in later life. He spoke of it as a great relief.’ She opined.
‘It sounds to me like loss. The death of something. I would regret that.’
‘Yet here you are seeking an answer?’
‘Well explanation possibly…’
‘What then is it that you want of me Ian?’
For the first time he noted with some admiration the fierce outline of her breasts, her tight looked after body, her knees pressed together modestly. Her hands, he also noted, were shapely, the nails unpainted but carefully manicured. Her ears too were small, like pressed flowers. A forty something woman with a tight fit body and a harsh face with cold green eyes.
‘Well perhaps I should ask what you can offer me?’
She shifted in her chair-a slight discomfort appeared to have brushed her like a chill breeze. She cradled her chin, somewhat hastily, and then dropped her hand back into her lap.
‘Who was the writer, the one that said that about the stallion?’
'I’m afraid I can’t remember’ Miriam said, ‘sorry.’
4.3.20: From blurb on the next Paris Review publication: Ideas of transformation, death, and the taboo appear again and again in this issue, from Senaa Ahmad’s electrifying take on the death of Anne Boleyn in “Let’s Play Dead” to the literal transmogrification in Jesse Ball’s “Diary of a Country Mouse” and Jayanta Mahapatra and Billy Collins’s respective poems on the deaths of friends, “After the Death of a Friend” and “On the Deaths of Friends.”
The video game creations of Hideo Kojima and the nature of his new game ‘Death Stranding.’ (Stranding derived from mass whale stranding incidents and their inherent mystery.) Ref: ‘A mind forever voyaging’ by Dylan Holmes/ ‘Hamlet on the holodeck’ by Janet Holmes. Article by Andrew Chen NY Times briefing.
- The new cookbook for Diana Henry ‘From the oven to the Table’. Chicken Thighs Forever. The actual sub-title of one of the chapters!
- The Fibonacci sequence. Explore the inherent nature of symmetry and the Golden Mean.
- Coronavirus provides respite for the planet from ceaseless human-bullshit producing activity. Mobility is bad (except for me)
- QUOTE: This is so true!
We know how much we don’t know
- Have you ever heard of the Dunning-Kruger Effect? If you haven’t come across the term before, you have definitely experienced the principle. It’s a psychological rule that states; it’s the most incompetent who are the most confident, while the intelligent ones doubt their own abilities. Put simply, dumb people are too dumb to know how dumb they are. Smart people are clever enough to know how much they don’t know. British philosopher Bertrand Russell who first laid out the idea perhaps summed it up best: “The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.” Basically, all of us have a pretty lousy grasp of the limits of our own competence one way or another.
- Hopper, Elizabeth. "What Is the Dunning-Kruger Effect?" ThoughtCo, Feb. 11, 2020, thoughtco.com/dunning-kruger-effect-4157431.
Anne Lamott (From the Brainpickings Website) On Writer's Purpose: 'We try to help where we can, and try to survive our own trials and stresses, illnesses and elections. We work really hard at not being driven crazy by noise and speed and extremely annoying people, whose names we are too polite to mention. We try not to be tripped up by major global sadness, difficulties in our families or the death of old pets…
We work hard, we enjoy life as we can, we endure. We try to help ourselves and one another. We try to be more present and less petty. Some days go better than others. We look for solace in nature and art and maybe, if we are lucky, the quiet satisfaction of our homes…
We’re social, tribal, musical animals, walking percussion instruments. Most of us do the best we can. We show up. We strive for gratitude, and try not to be such babies.
And then there’s a mass shooting, a nuclear plant melts down, just as a niece is born, or as you find love. The world is coming to an end. I hate that. In environmental ways, it’s true, and in existential ways, it has been since the day each of us was born.'
WHAT MUSIC AM I LISTENING TO?: 'Become Desert' John Luther Adams (Lovely ambient bellscape-excellent for writing to!) Persuasive evidence for Biophilia.
BLOG OF THE MONTH: Tyler Cowen 'Conversations with Tyler' Mercator Centre. The best interviewer I've heard across a staggering range of subjects. Always considered, intelligent and challenging. Also see his sonnet-like turn at the end of his interview on The Tim Ferris Show recently.
READING: 'Arctic Dreams' by Barry Lopez Poetic. Passionate. Tremendously moving writing on the nature of the Arctic World. Its animals, people, interlopers, abusive extractors and its meaning with its mystical magical wind sculpted ice-scape. Outstanding!
FINNEGAN'S WAKE by James Joyce: Has got me again! Diving in from Mon 16th March. Maybe away for a while! I will be posting updates.
TED GIOIA: Gentle reader if you have any desire to educate yourself truly in the ways of music then please absorb the contents of the wonderful Ted Gioia's blog post on The Best Music of 2019 http://www.tedgioia.com/bestalbumsof2019.html This is a true gift from Ted to the World, and will furnish your musical education for the next 12 months and beyond!
She seizes him in her white arms!
Her breasts are stirred and flecked!
She lands on him like Zeus on Leda!
The red skeins in her hair weave tales
of wildness and of chaos.
The sea is sounding in his shell!
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